David Irving: A Political Self-Portrait: Electronic Edition

1.9 Citing (neutrally, or with approval) the anti-Semitism of others

[1.9/A][In a paper delivered to the IHR, Irving speculated on why, in his mind, the so-called Eichmann memoirs had been supressed. One of the reasons he proffered his audience was Eichmann's belief that the Nazis had been lured into the Holocaust by Zionism.]

'The second interesting thing that emerges from Eichmann's own papers is that he's chewing over in his own mind - he's frightfully repetitive - he keeps on coming back, again and again, in his manuscripts and in these conversations to who was behind it, and what was behind it. What was behind "the Holocaust" (if we can use that word loosely here now)? He keeps coming back to the appalling thought: Did they manage to use us? Did the Zionists use the Nazis to further their own ends? Was the Holocaust something that they themselves inflicted on their own body, in order to bring about their Zionist cause in the long run?

This was Eichmann's theory, at the end of his life.[...] And perhaps this is the reason why the Eichmann papers were not supposed to see the light of day.' [P's speech at the 11th IHR Conference, 'The Suppressed Eichmann and Goebbels Papers' (published in JHR for March/April 1993): K3, Tab. 13, p. 19 (generally, pp. 18-25)]

[1.9/B]'Now I understand that at Mr Zundel's trial that one of these two Slovaks turned up for the prosecution and gave evidence and made a miserable impression. His name was Mr Vrba, Mr Vrba apparently didn't know half the things he was supposed to know from his own report. And when Mr Zundel told me this yesterday I could only say this was exactly my own impression, that in fact there were no two Slovaks Jews, that they are fictitious, they never existed, that the report is a concoction of some propaganda agency. And the interesting thing that occurred to me was that when this report came out published by the War Refugee Board in 1944, in November, 5 months after it came out of Europe, two newspapers immediately challenged its authenticity and refused to publish it. The New York Times and the Washington Post. Not just any two newspapers, but the two must prestigious newspapers in the United States. Initially refused to publish this report or to comment on it because it looked too phony to them. One of them pointed out the fact, or raised the startling hypothesis, that the report had actually been masterminded by Dr Goebbels' propaganda ministry. Lets dwell on that a minute. Let's wrap our minds around that concept. That this famous report by the two Slovak Jews had been produced by the Nazi propagandists themselves. Not my idea, it's the idea of the leading columnist in the New York Times for why he was not going to accept this report and publish it. He thought it was such an anti-Semitic report that the burden, of it the balance of the report when you finish reading the 25 pages and put it down your revulsion, is not only at the thought that the Germans were doing this to these helpless victims but you had a secondary revulsion that the people who were actually doing it on the spot, the trustees in the camp, the clerks, the bookkeepers, the people whose job it was to select and deport and ship into the gas chambers and carry out the bodies and so on, were all Jews themselves. This was the real burden of the report of the two Slovaks, to put their fingers on the Jews and say these were the real cruel people, the real atrocities were submitted by the Jews themselves in the camp at Auschwitz. A diabolical piece of propaganda issued by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry itself. This was the conclusion of the New York Times, privately, in reading this report. And if your first response is to say well it's a rare way to do it, you make people believe the lesser evil that the Jews were doing it but at the same time let them believe that Auschwitz had killed 1.75 million Jews, the answer to that was given by the columnist himself when he said "the world believes that about the Germans anyway", we've been pumping out atrocity propaganda about the Germans, the Germans are believed to have done this anyway and the propaganda Ministry, diabolical as they are, they will say let us put that into our own report and if that doesn't blacken us any further than we have been blackened by the world media anyway, if only we can get them to believe this vicious lie about the Jews themselves. It's a very interesting hypothesis.' [P's speech in Toronto, August 1988: K3, Tab. 2, pp. 14-15]